A World to Explore

Archive for January 23rd, 2015

This week we have another fossil from the Nicosia Formation (Pliocene) of the Mesaoria Plain in central Cyprus. It is again from a Keck Geology Consortium project in 1996 with Steve Dornbos (’97). This time, though, instead of our Coral Reef locality, our featured creature is from a sandy marl outcrop we called “Exploration”. We have above an aperture view of Naticarius millepunctatus Risso, 1826, a species still alive today and known as the “many-spotted moon shell”. It is a naticid gastropod, heir to a predatory tradition that strikes fear in the tiny hearts of bivalves.Naticid gastropods, like our Naticarius, have a well-muscled foot that they use to essentially swim through loose sand to capture infaunal bivalves and other shelled prey. They then use their specialized radula to drill into the shell, kill the unfortunate animal, and then consume the soft goodies. Naticids leave distinct drill holes in the shells of their victims, as shown in a previous Fossil of the Week post. We found a few drilled bivalve shells with our Naticarius millepunctatus at the Exploration site.Naticarius was named as a genus in 1806 by André Marie Constant Duméril (1774-1860). Duméril was another member of that marvelous group of French zoologists that lived through the French Revolution. He was a professor of anatomy, herpetology and ichthyology at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, corresponding and collaborating with such eminents as Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart. His most prominent work was Zoologie analytique, published in 1806. In this massive treatise he compiled descriptions of all the known genera of animals in an effort to sort them out in a repeatable way.This is a page from Duméril’s Zoologie analytique. We immediately recognize this as a binary taxonomic key, even if we can’t read the French. Starting from the left we make yes or no decisions about the anatomy of the animal we’re trying to identify, eventually ending on the right with a genus. (Naticarius is at number 10.)

André Marie Constant Duméril did prodigious work with reptiles as well, describing in detail 1393 “species” over nine volumes. (Oddly, in defiance of his fellow zoologists, he insisted that amphibians should be counted among the reptiles, thus the quotes around his number of “reptiles”.) Duméril also had major works on insects. His son, Auguste Duméril, was also a zoologist. As the elder Duméril retired, Auguste gradually took over his scientific projects.

References:

Cowper Reed, F.R. 1935. LII.—Notes on the Neogene Faunas of Cyprus.—III. The Pliocene Faunas. Journal of Natural History 16: 489-524.